I thought I'd take some time to share with you guys an important lesson I learned recently about how my mind processes CG animation. For the past several quarters that I've been at SCAD, I was taught to 1.) always work with Gimbal rotations and 2.) work in stepped mode until it's basically all animated and then switch over to spline, plateau, etc. On my last assignment for naturalistic (which isn't posted at the moment) I was doing just that -- I blocked everything out perfectly and was about to switch over to spline when what should happen? ALL OF MY TIMING WAS GONE. I'm sure you've all been there, that feeling of "Where did my beautiful animation go??" as you notice all your curves fighting against your every attempt at controlling them. It's like you have to reanimate everything to get it back to what you thought it would look like originally. It made me dislike CG animation, it frustrated me that much.
The problem was that my mind simply could not process that big of a change. I struggled to fix every little curve but the graph editor always seemed to win. My animation just didn't look the way I wanted it to anymore. I didn't understand it.
Then one day when I was presenting my work, I told that to my professor, that the stepped - spline leap was just incomprehensible. He told me to do something I never thought of doing: "Don't work on stepped. Work on linear, it'll force you to put the pauses in. And use local rotations, your arms will work better."
Don't work on stepped? I thought you HAD to work on stepped. That seemed to be what they did in all the classes, tutorials, industry videos.... I never thought to try anything else.
The next animation I started, I didn't use stepped. I worked right on spline from the get go (I prefer it to linear) and set my rotations to local. WHAT A DIFFERENCE.
Suddenly I could see my timing as it was happening. I could adjust things as I went, and the graph editor became my friend as it helped me along the way rather than overwhelming me at the end. And local rotations removed the possibility of Gimbal lock. It was amazing. Things made sense!!
I'm not recommending this technique for everyone. Some people work best blocking things in stepped and using Gimbal rotations. I guess the point I want to make is, don't think you have to animate the way everyone else does. Do what works for you! My technique may be different, but it makes sense to me, and it's brought life back into my animations.
Now then, back to work!!
